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Re(2): [CCBC-Net] Biography
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From: Monica R. Edinger <edinger>
Date: Sat, 04 Nov 2000 09:31:49 +0000
Linnea writes:
And isn't that what learning is all about? Insight into the human condition?
Recently, I watched a ten year old student of mine avidly read the biography, "Hawk: Occupation: Skateboarder." (Regan Books, 2000.) A very picky reader, Jared told me that he likes books about real people
(including Harry Potter who for Jared is quite life-like.) It seems to me that what he likes more specifically are books about people who are somehow familiar to him. Not necessarily familiar in his own life, but people he can fantasize himself being, be it Hawk or Harry. These two personalities, one real and one not, appeal to Jared, I suspect, because of his love of sports. Kenny, the quite real protagonist in The Watson's Go to Birmingham63 (which I just finished reading aloud to my class), did nothing for him. While most of the kids loved the book (historical fiction based on real life), I suspect Kenny and his world were simply too far away from Jared's real one (he can't wait for his afterschool sports program to the point where I have to insist he get his whole rear end on the rug during our end-of?y read aloud time or he'd literally have one foot out the door) and dream world (to be a Yankee one day!) Jared can more easily imagine himself Harry or Hawk than Kenny.
I want Jared and his peers to be intrigued and fascinated by the past and its inhabitants, yet I also want them to view the people of those worlds as real, not analogous to characters in a fantasy novel. Jared's attraction to both real-life Hawk and fantasy Harry demonstrates the tightrope act that teaching history is for me. I believe it was Louise Rosenblatt who wrote of the "dance of the stances", those stances being efferent (reading for information) and aesthetic (reading for artistic pleasure) and the dance being the constant movement between the two as we read. I think there is a similar dance going on with our efforts to understand the past.
Depending on the child reader's personal situation and background knowledge, those past worlds can seem indeed pretty close to fantasy worlds. They can be fascinating or alienating. Reading about the use of a privy can cause one of my students to screech to a halt while another will zoom right on. Some want to learn about how a child of the past is similar to themselves, others how they are pretty different from themselves. Sam Wineberg, wonderful writer on historical teaching and thinking wrote in a brilliant article, "Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts":
"Exactly when in the flow of human experience does last month become strange, last year remote? Indeed, when pushed to its extreme, the consequences of thinking that there is no continuity with the past are as grave as thinking that the past directly mirrors the present. David Lowenthal reminds us that the past is a 'foreign country.' A foreign country, not a foreign planet....Historical thinking requires us to reconcile two contradictory positions: first, that our established modes of thinking are an inheritance that cannot be sloughed off; second, that if we make no attempt to slough them off, we are doomed to a mind-numbing presentism that reads the present onto the past. " (March 1999, Kappan, http://www.pdkintl.org/kappan/kwin9903.htm)
Jane Kurtz, author of works of historical fiction and nonfiction, has told me that kids are terribly interested in knowing if her stories are real. And Linda Goettina wrote that, "I often think when reading history or biography we demand the truth because we are so uncomfortable with the ambiguities and unknown." With the help of many on this list and Child_lit I've become convinced that this truth is elusive. One man's truth is another man's fiction. And I think my nine and ten year old students are quite capable of being aware of this as they explore that foreign country otherwise known as the past.
Monica
Monica Edinger The Dalton School New York NY edinger at dalton.org monicaedinger at yahoo.com
Received on Sat 04 Nov 2000 03:31:49 AM CST
Date: Sat, 04 Nov 2000 09:31:49 +0000
Linnea writes:
And isn't that what learning is all about? Insight into the human condition?
Recently, I watched a ten year old student of mine avidly read the biography, "Hawk: Occupation: Skateboarder." (Regan Books, 2000.) A very picky reader, Jared told me that he likes books about real people
(including Harry Potter who for Jared is quite life-like.) It seems to me that what he likes more specifically are books about people who are somehow familiar to him. Not necessarily familiar in his own life, but people he can fantasize himself being, be it Hawk or Harry. These two personalities, one real and one not, appeal to Jared, I suspect, because of his love of sports. Kenny, the quite real protagonist in The Watson's Go to Birmingham63 (which I just finished reading aloud to my class), did nothing for him. While most of the kids loved the book (historical fiction based on real life), I suspect Kenny and his world were simply too far away from Jared's real one (he can't wait for his afterschool sports program to the point where I have to insist he get his whole rear end on the rug during our end-of?y read aloud time or he'd literally have one foot out the door) and dream world (to be a Yankee one day!) Jared can more easily imagine himself Harry or Hawk than Kenny.
I want Jared and his peers to be intrigued and fascinated by the past and its inhabitants, yet I also want them to view the people of those worlds as real, not analogous to characters in a fantasy novel. Jared's attraction to both real-life Hawk and fantasy Harry demonstrates the tightrope act that teaching history is for me. I believe it was Louise Rosenblatt who wrote of the "dance of the stances", those stances being efferent (reading for information) and aesthetic (reading for artistic pleasure) and the dance being the constant movement between the two as we read. I think there is a similar dance going on with our efforts to understand the past.
Depending on the child reader's personal situation and background knowledge, those past worlds can seem indeed pretty close to fantasy worlds. They can be fascinating or alienating. Reading about the use of a privy can cause one of my students to screech to a halt while another will zoom right on. Some want to learn about how a child of the past is similar to themselves, others how they are pretty different from themselves. Sam Wineberg, wonderful writer on historical teaching and thinking wrote in a brilliant article, "Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts":
"Exactly when in the flow of human experience does last month become strange, last year remote? Indeed, when pushed to its extreme, the consequences of thinking that there is no continuity with the past are as grave as thinking that the past directly mirrors the present. David Lowenthal reminds us that the past is a 'foreign country.' A foreign country, not a foreign planet....Historical thinking requires us to reconcile two contradictory positions: first, that our established modes of thinking are an inheritance that cannot be sloughed off; second, that if we make no attempt to slough them off, we are doomed to a mind-numbing presentism that reads the present onto the past. " (March 1999, Kappan, http://www.pdkintl.org/kappan/kwin9903.htm)
Jane Kurtz, author of works of historical fiction and nonfiction, has told me that kids are terribly interested in knowing if her stories are real. And Linda Goettina wrote that, "I often think when reading history or biography we demand the truth because we are so uncomfortable with the ambiguities and unknown." With the help of many on this list and Child_lit I've become convinced that this truth is elusive. One man's truth is another man's fiction. And I think my nine and ten year old students are quite capable of being aware of this as they explore that foreign country otherwise known as the past.
Monica
Monica Edinger The Dalton School New York NY edinger at dalton.org monicaedinger at yahoo.com
Received on Sat 04 Nov 2000 03:31:49 AM CST
